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HUFFINGTON POST: Chubby Checker’s lawsuit over a smartphone app that claims to measures penis size is the latest in a checkered record at attempting to maintain relevancy through the twists and turns of pop culture. The app is is called the “Chubby Checker” referring to a slang term for an erection. The 71-year-old Checker, whose real name is Ernest Evans, is suing Hewlett Packard and its subsidiary Palm, Inc. for $500 million, claiming the app associates his name with obscene, sexual connotation and images, without giving him “compensation for the unauthorized use of the Chubby Checker name and trademark,” Webosnation.com reported. The lawsuit comes as Checker tries to reinvigorate his career by promoting “Changes,” a new single. “With all of this activity surrounding the excitement and the legend, we’re more interested in airplay than litigation,” Checker said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “As they say in the legal community, ‘Let the lawyers handle it.'” Checker’s suit was filed recently in a Florida court by his lawyer, personal injury attorney Willie Gary, even though the app has only been downloaded 84 times since 2010, TCPalm reported. “This lawsuit is about preserving the integrity and legacy of a man who has spent years working hard at his musical craft and has earned the position of one of the greatest musical entertainers of all time,” Gary said in a press release. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: Chubby Checker has changed the world in such a way that nothing will ever be the same again. He’s held his tongue about this incontrovertible fact for 43 long years. But the time has come for him to break his silence. Chubby has given the world so much and now he wants something in return. Not money. He’s got plenty of that. Not a beautiful wife and kids. He’s got those, too. Seven cars? Check. A gated estate in the suburbs? Got it.

No, what Chubby Checker wants is R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Capital-R respect. The kind of respect that lasts the ages, the kind that confers immortality on mere mortals.

Chubby wants the kind of respect afforded Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Because, he says, what he’s brought to the world is no less essential to civilization than the telephone and the electric light bulb.

He’s not kidding. Laugh if you like, but until you can prove him wrong he’s not going to shut up about it.

Chubby, you see, popularized the notion of dancing apart to the beat. This little phrase is Chubby’s personal mantra. He utters it incessantly, as if it becomes truer every time he says it. In the years B.C.–Before Chubby–social dancing never strayed far from the rigidly scripted calisthenics of ballroom technique.

All of that changed with a little dance craze called the Twist, which turned into the Hucklebuck, which turned into the Pony, which, when you slowed it down–and Motown’s sultry, slow-burn groove saw to that–became the Rosetta Stone of every dance move thrown down by party people from the discotheque to the high school dance to every wedding reception you have ever been to.

The collective booty wiggle of the last four decades is rooted in the gyrations Chubby Checker introduced to the world in 1959. “There is nobody on the planet that dances whose lives I haven’t touched, whether they know it or not,” he says.

So now Chubby wants his due. He’s not asking for much: A Nobel Peace Prize and a statue of himself in the courtyard of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland will do it.

He will not even consider accepting induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until they build him that statue. Never mind that the Hall of Fame has yet to extend him an offer for induction. And never mind that there are no statues in the courtyard of the Hall of Fame. None. No Elvis statue. No Beatles statue. No Chuck Berry statue. And that’s just the way Chubby wants it when they build his statue. Just Chubby and nobody else.

“When somebody else comes along that changes music,” he says, “they can have their statue next to me, Chubby Checker, the official king of the music business.” MORE

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Friday, February 15th, 2013 at
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